University teacher educators’ research engagement: Perspectives from Saudi Arabia Simon Borg a, * , Yousif Alshumaimeri b a School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK b King Saud University, Saudi Arabia article info Article history: Received 14 June 2011 Received in revised form 29 September 2011 Accepted 28 October 2011 Keywords: Educational research Higher education Teacher educators Saudi Arabia Research engagement abstract This paper examines university teacher educators’ engagement with and in educational research. Survey results collected from eighty-two teacher educators at a leading university in Saudi Arabia pointed to modest levels of research activity and also suggested that these individuals held largely technical views of what research is. Their assessments of their institutional research culture also signalled a perceived gap between the research productivity expected of them and the support they received from their university. The implications of these findings for promoting research activity among university teacher educators, where this is considered desirable, are discussed. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In this paper we examine the research activity of teacher educators working in a leading university in Saudi Arabia. This university, like others in the Kingdom, expects its staff to conduct high quality research, and through this study we aim to provide insight into the extent to which the teacher educators are research- engaged, the beliefs about research which underpin this engage- ment, and their perspectives on the extent to which their institu- tion is conducive to productive research activity. Such insights can provide a valuable basis for considering how university teacher educators in the institution studied might be supported in extending both the range and quality of the research they do. This study has broader international relevance too, given that support- ing university teacher educators’ research activity in this manner will be a common goal in many higher education contexts both in the Gulf region and beyond. It is important to stress at the outset, though, that our position here is not a normative one e i.e. despite some evidence that doing research may be a core task for university teacher educators (Koster, Brekelmans, Korthagen, & Wubbels, 2005), we are not seeking to argue that the teacher educators in the context studied here or elsewhere should be research active; we also acknowledge Macfarlane’s (2011) argument that the increasingly specialized roles adopted by academics (e.g. in teaching or management) mean that, especially in contexts such as the UK and the USA, it can longer be assumed that all academics are research active. We make no such assumptions here and our goal is to understand, in a context where university teacher educators are expected to be research active, the nature of such activity and the factors that shape it. 2. Teacher educators’ research engagement Koster et al. (2005: 157) define a teacher educator as “someone who provides instruction or who gives guidance and support to student teachers”. This study, as explained above, focuses on the engagement both with (i.e. through reading) as well as in (i.e. through doing) research of teacher educators who are university-based (rather than working in schools or in non-university institutions). In terms of teacher educators doing research, there has been much interest in recent years in practitioner research and self study (e.g. Gallagher, Griffin, Parker, Kitchen, & Figg, 2011; Lunenberg, Ponte, & Van De Ven, 2007) and numerous examples of teacher educators engaging in these forms of inquiry have been published (e.g. in the journal Studying Teacher Education). Broader surveys, though, of the research engagement and views about research of university teacher educators in particular contexts are lacking. Joram (2007) did examine the beliefs about research knowledge held by seven professors on a teacher education programme in the USA and found that they viewed such knowledge as falsifiable and * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 113 343 4552; fax: þ44 113 343 4541. E-mail address: s.borg@education.leeds.ac.uk (S. Borg). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate 0742-051X/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2011.10.011 Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 347e356